Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

Snooker is just chess with balls.

Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.